the .blog of Sean Sullivan

Apparently, this presentation was the winner of Slideshare.com’s “World’s Greatest Presentation” contest. Entitled Thirst, I found this presentation very eye opening and inspiring.

It’s amazing how many people work very hard to reduce their carbon footprint but don’t even realize how much their water consumption has an impact on the planet. Also, it is shocking to me from the standpoint that we, here in the states, take for granted the fact that we can walk over to the faucet and get a drink of water whenever we want.

Friends have told me stories of people they know joining the Peace Corps and coming back being super frugal about using water. For me, just learning/being reminded of the few facts in this presentation has affected how I think about my own water consumption.

Notable facts from the presentation:

• Less than .007% of the Earth’s water is consumable by humans
• A 10-minute shower uses 50 gallons of water
• 1 in 5 people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water

I really like this picture that I took last time we visited Florence. Too bad the camera that I took it with is now worth more as a paper weight than it is as a camera…

I initially tried to post this using Flickr’s “blog this” functionality but found it quite limiting in that it doesn’t let you choose positioning or image size.

This past Wednesday was my birthday. I came home from jammin’ out with the band to find this awesome cake that Becca had made for me. Not only did she bake this crazy awesome homemade cake filled with delicious pudding and butter cream frosting, but she also frosted a Greek key on the side to accentuate the masculinity of the cake!

When we bought our house back in March, we decided that the one lesser attractive part of the home was the manner in which the backyard presented itself. When the house was built, they had simply poured a slab of concrete outside the back sliding door and that was that.

Well, we decided that we’d like to have something a little more inviting going on out there, so Becca’s dad and I took it upon ourselves to build a deck one weekend.

I wasn’t really sure what the plan would be to build it, but with her dad being experienced in this sort of thing I figured he would have some excellent suggestions. The existing concrete slab provided a good starting point as it left us in the position where we didn’t have to worry about digging post holes or any of that nonsense.

After 12 hours of work on a beautiful sunny day, we finally had the deck completed. Here’s the before and after pictures.

A lot has happened since June 11, 2007. I’ve been super busy with the usual attempts to balance work and home life. However, there’s been some super exciting things going on that I’ve failed to blog about!

Since I’ve been really bad about updating my blog in the last year (and I promise the drought is ending), I feel that it is much needed to update everybody on what I’ve been up to. Consider this my excuse list for why I’ve been such a bad blogger. Here’s a brief list of all the great things that have happened in my life since this time last year.

Read on to see the list! (more…)

I went on my first fishing trip in about 3 years (I’m ashamed to say) yesterday with a few friends.  We headed over to the Breitenbush River, just to the NE of Detroit Lake here in Oregon.  The river bank was awesome, with pretty fast paced water shooting over rock formations.  However, we didn’t see a trout all day…

I’ve posted my photos from this trip on flickr, view them here!

She said yes! =)

On Christmas-eve-eve, somebody decided to attempt to steal my car (or maybe my insanely fashionable sunglasses from Kohl’s out of my car). So anyways, I got to wake up to my driver-side window being smashed. Keep in mind this car is only six months old so I was pretty unhappy with having to drop a bunch of cash to have a new window put in it. Luckily the Saturn dealership was open that day and did a great job of detailing my interior to rid my car of all evidence of the disaster. However, I had to go an entire week without a car. Things are back to normal now but here are some photos commemorating the incident.